Villagers accuse city of seizing water as drought parches ‘India’s Detroit’

Other Indian cities, including the capital New Delhi and Bengaluru, are also grappling with water shortages

In the small village of Bangarampettai, 20 miles from Chennai, about 150 people last month “captured” a water tanker, breaking its windscreen and deflating its tyres before handing it over to a police station. People living on the outskirts of this metropolis are laying siege to tanker lorries because they fear their water reserves are being sacrificed so city dwellers, businesses and luxury hotels don’t run out.

“Private tankers have fitted more than eight bore wells in our village and are indiscriminately extracting thousands of litres of water every day,” the villagers wrote in a letter to a government official in the region a day after they stopped the tanker.

A lack of rainfall mean that all four reservoirs that supply Chennai, a carmaking centre dubbed ‘India’s Detroit’, have run virtually dry. That has forced some schools to shut, companies to ask employees to work from home and hotels to ration water for guests.

Other Indian cities, including the capital New Delhi and Bengaluru, are also grappling with water shortages. But the problem is most acute in Chennai, where tensions have been inflamed by the state government tapping wells normally used for agriculture and villagers’ daily needs.

In their letter, the villagers said they had petitioned officials, including the district’s top administrator, several times, but the tankers keep returning.

“We don’t have water in one of the two water tanks in the village now because the private tankers have been extracting water day and night,” said S Arul, a local signboard painter.

Groundwater levels in Chennai’s neighbouring districts, Thiruvallur, and Kancheepuram, fell at a faster rate in May than the state average in districts excluding Chennai, data from the state’s public works department showed. Data for Chennai district has not been made public. The Kancheepuram district, which has the factories of many foreign automakers, saw groundwater levels deplete more than 6 ft (1.88 metres), or three times the state average, to about 20 ft during the year ended May, the data showed.

There is no sign yet that the factories are having to reduce production because of the shortage. M Jeeva, 27, who runs a hardware store near Bangarampettai, said he followed trucks taking the village’s water back into the city and found they mostly supply hotels and companies.

And N Nijalingam, president of the South Chennai Private Water Tankers Association, confirmed some tankers have been chased away, while others have had confrontations with angry crowds on the city’s outskirts.